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      Soccer’s Focus Needs to Be Product, Not Packaging

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      A simple rule change paved the way for the modern soccer we watch today. An obsession with Super Bowl-style changes won’t move it forward.Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could quite dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the estimable Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of soccer analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.The answer, as he found it, was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all of the other players combined. The best way to win in soccer, Jeandupeux had discovered, was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department, the part of soccer’s world governing body that looks after the actual soccer. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action. Jeandupeux had an idea of what that might be.His timing, it turned out, was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organization, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.A few months after that World Cup, Blatter had created what he called Task Force 2000, which is precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of identifying ways to make the game more appealing, more dynamic, more dramatic.Jeandupeux’s letter, passed to Platini and his fellow Task Force members, crystallized many of their thoughts. Now they not only had empirical proof that soccer had grown slow, cautious and dull, but a recommendation as to how to change it. Jeandupeux had suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a soccer cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEverything in modern soccer flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at soccer’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League — an entire century — is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of soccer itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux sat down and wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The soccer that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chairman of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris St.-Germain or chairman of BeIn Sports or chairman of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.They range from the rather vague — amounting essentially to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFTs” — to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes it is worth exploring the idea of an expanded European Super Cup, turning a semi-serious showpiece into a tournament in its own right, one that may be played outside Europe. He would consider a Final Four-style tournament for the Champions League. He would, reading between the lines, contemplate changing kickoff times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.Despite the very obvious self-interest of their source, despite the fact that not all of these ideas are his, and despite the circumstance — almost exactly a year since the sudden launch and swift death of the European Super League project — these ideas should not be rejected out of hand.They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, but nor are they entirely devoid of merit. Soccer would do well to remember that, at first, it was assumed that the backpass law would simply encourage goalkeepers to launch the ball at every given opportunity; nobody imagined that its ultimate consequence would be Éderson.Expanding the Super Cup is, on the face of it, a reasonable idea. It is possible that the benefits of staging the semifinals and final of the Champions League in a single location — the sense of occasion, the drama of a one-and-done knockout — would outweigh the undoubted complications in security, logistics and the loss of revenue and, crucially, atmosphere generated by semifinals on a club’s home turf.Albert Gea/ReutersEven the concept of teams’ being given a pass into the Champions League despite not qualifying domestically is not quite as absurd as has been presented: Though such a proposal would, doubtlessly, increase the inequality that remains the game’s greatest challenge, there is at least some logic in the idea that how you perform in the tournament itself should be rewarded.There is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, then, simply because they represent change. Change, as Jeandupeux would testify, can sometimes bring improvements, and in ways that are not immediately apparent. The problem, in fact, is the opposite; these ideas do not represent change enough.It was striking, for example, that Al-Khelaifi should cite the Super Bowl as an example of the sort of things soccer should be doing. Why, he asked, was the final of the Champions League not more of an event? Why was it not more of a show? Why was there not a litany of the world’s biggest musical acts lining up to play at the world’s biggest annual sporting fixture?These are all questions that soccer executives ask with alarming frequency. (The answer to that last one, for what it’s worth, is that the world’s biggest musical acts know full well that they would be jeered if they played the Champions League final, because all of the people in the stadium are there to see a soccer match, not a concert.)Patricia De Melo Moreira/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNobody, anywhere, is quite so obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run Europe’s soccer teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, or the reality that soccer is more popular by an order of magnitude worldwide than the N.F.L., and that it has achieved all of that despite not having a halftime show. It gives the impression that soccer’s leaders have startlingly little confidence in the sport in which they have invested.That is not the case, of course; the reasoning is a little more subtle. The game’s power brokers propose these things — fireworks, dance troupes, rebranded competitions, format changes and all the rest of it — because, while the changes that would have the most effect are far simpler, they are very much not in their interests.The way to make every game “an event,” as Al-Khelaifi put it, is not to invite Maroon 5. It is to increase the competitive balance between the two competing teams so that the result does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stages are not “compelling” is not because there is no Jean-Michel Jarre-style light show before kickoff; it is because it is a group stage, and so there is no genuine sense of jeopardy.Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of soccer — of sports — understands that: Memories only need to stretch as far back as last week, and the playoffs for the World Cup, to realize that drama is not generated by the staging of a game or even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.Al-Khelaifi, of course, is not going to propose any change that radical, any change that meaningful. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit P.S.G. or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues, even after the Super League debacle, to dominate UEFA’s thinking.Instead, he and his peers will continue to believe — and to insist — that soccer’s route to growth lies in improving the packaging, rather than the product. Like Jeandupeux, all those years ago, they very clearly sense in some way that things are just getting a little boring. The difference is that they are holding on to the ball, and they will do all they can to not give it back.Here’s What Else We Did This WeekKevin De Bruyne, center, and Manchester City broke through, eventually, Atlético Madrid’s defense.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night, it was very difficult to have any sympathy with the idea that the Champions League needs to change at all, other than perhaps by introducing some sort of rule that Karim Benzema’s presence should be compulsory in all matches.The previous evening, spent watching Manchester City try to break Atlético Madrid’s fearsome resistance, was not quite as entertaining. That is not because Atlético should not rely on grit and grizzle more than flash and flair, but because a cornerstone of any great defensive performance is some sort of attacking threat.And you may not have noticed, because FIFA has not been keen to publicize it, but it turns out we are not getting a biennial World Cup after all. Even the expanded Club World Cup seems to have faded from view somewhat. This happens a lot to Gianni Infantino’s big ideas, when you think about it.CorrespondenceA Qatar World Cup will turn off some viewers.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockIn good news for Alan Goldhammer, but bad news for both FIFA and the many and varied sports-washers of the world, we can now say with some certainty that he is far from alone.The audience for this newsletter is a self-selecting demographic, of course — one defined, let’s be clear, by its impeccable taste — and so cannot be treated as a broad sample. But it would appear that there are quite a few of you out there, like Alan, who do not intend to bless the Qatar World Cup with your attention.“I refuse to lend my eyes to an event which is designed by a nasty regime to bolster its image,” wrote Nathan Wajsman. “I also skipped the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing. It may not mean anything to the organizers, but it means something to me.Sjaak Blaauw has come to the same conclusion. “With 6,500 people having lost their lives, and many workers not having been paid what was their due, I cannot condone this,” he wrote.Some are a little more conflicted. “I am getting closer to Alan Goldhammer’s sentiment, but it is taking more time and thought for me,” wrote Rashmi Khare. “I feel more and more like I am being manipulated. If I participate, my eyeballs and my dollars will be used to justify the corruption that led to this tournament. If I do a full blackout, it’s just one less eyeball/dollar from billions.”And others still offered a different perspective. “Good on Mr. Goldhammer,” wrote Nick Adams, before acknowledging that rather than not watch, he would “put my mind to thinking how to make Qatar safe for all visitors, how I would voice a protest, and how I would do something to change the corrupt decision-making process” that led to the tournament’s being held there in the first place.There were many more submissions, all of them just as sincerely held and articulately expressed. Thank you to all of you who emailed, and please keep them coming. The correspondence on that subject has been rivaled only by the continued debate about deep dish “pizza,” including an assessment from Bart McKay that I enjoyed enormously. “Deep dish pizza,” he wrote, “is just casserole with better P.R.” More

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      Manchester City Finds Breakthrough Against Atlético Madrid

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      Atlético Madrid hunkered down and defended in its Champions League quarterfinal at Manchester City. But a single goal might be enough to send it packing.MANCHESTER, England — After a while, feeling bored, cold and wet, Éderson decided to go for a walk. The Manchester City goalkeeper had spent 20 minutes dutifully guarding his penalty area. He had checked all four corners for danger. He found nothing. He had stared, squinting, into the distance, scanning for some threat on the horizon. Nothing there, either.And so, idly, he wandered forward. He was entirely alone. There was nobody else in his half of the field. Manchester City’s central defenders, the players employed as his doughty sentries, were now stationed deep in Atlético Madrid territory, in the sorts of positions more habitually occupied by elfin attacking midfielders.As he approached the halfway line, Éderson slowed his pace just a little. He had the air of a man who had been walking with no particular destination in mind: He did not really know what he planned to do when he got there. He bounced on his heels. He stretched down and touched his toes. He loitered for a few seconds, reveling in the sensation of what it must be like to be involved in a soccer match, and then, slowly made his way back, ruefully retaking his lonely post.The Brazilian’s ennui could not — as it often can, during the course of both the domestic and the European seasons — be traced to Manchester City’s overwhelming superiority over its opposition, to its vast financial power, to its supercharged strength. Or, rather, it cannot solely be traced to that. To some extent, Éderson was bored because Atlético Madrid was content for him to be bored.Diego Simeone has made his career with teams that give away nothing. Now, facing a 1-0 deficit after the first leg, his squad needs to find something extra.Phil Noble/ReutersPerhaps the best indication of how Diego Simeone, Atlético’s coach, intended to approach Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League quarterfinal came in its first second. Manchester City had the kickoff, and at that instant, every single Atlético player seemed to take a step back, each man moving a little farther into his own half.Or maybe it was that brief, fleeting and possibly accidental moment when the redoubtable Geoffrey Kondogbia burst into City’s half, looked up, and saw nothing in front of him except a couple of light blue jerseys and a broad swath of green. His teammates had not so much as flickered. They were all locked in their holding pattern, under orders to stand their ground.That is exactly how Simeone wants it, of course. The Argentine is in many ways the polar opposite to Pep Guardiola, his City counterpart. That is a cliché, now, the sort of glib judgment that feels too easy, but it holds true.Guardiola’s vision of soccer is based on making space appear out of nowhere. Simeone’s is focused, laser sharp, on finding ways to make it evaporate. Guardiola has built his legend on making things happen. Simeone has constructed his on making sure they do not.Guardiola has said, previously, that his ideal goal would involve every single player touching the ball, possibly more than once, before someone — it does not matter who — strokes it into an unguarded goal.On Tuesday, Simeone seemed to be trying something different: chasing some mad dream in which an entire game went by without any of his players doing something as effete as actually touching the ball, so consumed were they by the important business of shutting down passing lanes and closing off angles of attack.Bernardo Silva, seeking out the spaces that didn’t exist.Phil Noble/ReutersThe style is, when it works, difficult to love but easy to admire. And it has worked, and worked spectacularly, for some time. That doggedness, that resolve, that defiance has become the cornerstone of Atlético’s modern European identity, the core value that has turned a perpetual underdog into a true European power: a winner of two Spanish titles and two Europa Leagues, twice a Champions League finalist, now safely ensconced in its own spectacular and vaguely soulless suburban superdome.And it almost worked here, too, against Guardiola’s latest masterpiece, a team that remains all but untouchable in the Premier League, a team that most likely ranks as the best in the world. Atlético stifled Manchester City almost entirely for the first half, and for vast tracts of the second, too, in the sort of vintage Simeone display that has earned Atlético its status as the standard-bearers of soccer’s counterculture, its final resistance to the prevailing wind of pressing and possession.The almost is significant, though. Not simply because City did, eventually, pick its way through, Phil Foden carving a path past Atlético’s massed ranks, creating just enough space for Kevin de Bruyne to win the game. That will not detain Simeone unnecessarily. He would, privately, be pleased simply to have escaped from the Etihad with his side still in the tie.Kevin De Bruyne delivered the only goal Manchester City needed on Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersNo, far more important is what happened at the other end. There is one form of defense that Atlético, this Atlético, has not mastered, one aspect of its chosen art that continues to prove elusive: the attack.The best defensive performances necessarily include moments of menace, after all. It is in those moments, those rare forays upfield, when an overworked defense has time to recover, to reorganize, to regroup. And it is in those moments, too, that doubt is sowed in the mind of the opposition, when even a team as fine as Manchester City starts to second-guess itself, when it begins to wonder if it should be committing quite so many players forward.Simeone’s best Atlético teams had that: the pace of Antoine Griezmann, the guile of an autumnal David Villa, the taurine bellicosity of Diego Costa. This Atlético team does not. It did not muster a shot on goal in the first half. It had one, possibly, in the second, though there is a very good chance that it was meant as a cross.That, ultimately, is the flaw in the plan, the problem with finding contentment in nothingness. The defense did not hold, not quite, and now Atlético must win in Madrid next week, and to do that it must open spaces, not close them. It must create, rather than destroy. Simeone was quite happy, it seemed, for Éderson to be bored. He was not nearly as happy, though, as Guardiola. More

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      Can Liverpool and City Win When the Bar Is Set Too High?

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      The Premier League leaders will compete for three high-profile trophies this spring. But does failing to win them all turn a great season into a bad one?Manchester City had everything ready. A few days before the 2019 F.A. Cup final, the club’s executives had already mapped out the route for the victory parade. They had booked the open-top bus. They had arranged a whole day of festivities. They were well aware it was tempting fate, but they had no choice: These things, after all, take time and planning.Besides, whatever happened against Watford at Wembley, there would be plenty to celebrate. Pep Guardiola’s team had won the Carabao Cup, the first and the least of England’s domestic priorities, a couple months earlier. The previous week, it had seen off the spirited challenge of Liverpool to retain the Premier League title. The F.A. Cup would complete the set.The only thing left to decide was how to brand the achievement. Everything needs a name these days. Everything needs a hashtag. The previous year, it had been easy. Then, City had become the first team in English history to claim 100 points in a single season; the players who had done it were crowned not just champions, but Centurions, too.They were now on the cusp of following that with an even more impressive feat: becoming the first side in English history to win a domestic treble, a clean sweep of the league title and both cup competitions.Inside the club, though, there were qualms about using that word — treble — too loudly. Some executives feared it was too closely associated with Manchester United’s 1999 team, the one that won the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League. Needing to qualify City’s treble as “domestic” might, they worried, cheapen it somehow.Ferran Soriano, City’s domineering chief executive, felt there was another problem. City, he was adamant, would have four trophies to parade. It had, back in August, won the Community Shield, too. That the traditional curtain-raiser for the English season is, in effect, a preseason friendly with some fireworks at the end of it did not deter him. It was a trophy, Soriano said. City should celebrate it. He even had the nomenclature ready: the Fourmidables.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was more than a little unease at the suggestion. Several City executives cautioned that including the Community Shield would expose the club to accusations of résumé padding that were, in the circumstances, entirely unnecessary. Soriano, though, would not be swayed. Crucially, he had Guardiola’s support, too. A couple of days later, after City won the final, its bus picked its way through the streets of Manchester, the word “Fourmidables” plastered on its side.That Soriano was willing to ignore the concerns of his colleagues and subordinates, and withstand the allegations of hubris from rival fans, is instructive. Whatever else he might be — visionary, maverick, the sort of person one can imagine self-identifying as a “disrupter” — Soriano has an instinctive understanding of modern soccer. And in modern soccer, he knows, glory is measured in bulk.In the month or so since Liverpool lifted this season’s Carabao Cup, Jürgen Klopp has fielded questions about whether his team can win a “quadruple” — all of England’s domestic competitions, plus the Champions League — on an almost weekly basis. He has dismissed them equally frequently. “We are not even close to thinking about crazy stuff like that,” he said last month.Guardiola will know the feeling. He, too, has been peppered with questions — certainly since the turn of the year, if not before — about whether this edition of Manchester City can claim another treble this season, one that does not require the geographical qualifier. He, too, has done what he can to minimize expectations. “I try to say to the club ‘enjoy these moments during the season’,” he said. “Don’t wait to win the Premier League, the Champions League or the F.A. Cup to be happy. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the moment.”Once you’ve won the league, does the Carabao Cup measure up?Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is not hard to trace the roots of this obsession with doubles and trebles and, now, quadruples: In several leagues across Europe, the superclub era of the last decade or so has rendered winning a single league title essentially meaningless for the likes of Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich and — until its self-inflicted implosion — Juventus.Their domestic leagues are so hopelessly unbalanced that the destiny of the championship is rarely in any real doubt. With that trophy essentially preordained, they are left to find other targets. That may be a streak — picking up nine or 10 titles in a row — or it may be supplementing it with a glut of other prizes. Failure to do so can, with increasing frequency, cost a manager their job.That has, slowly, turned this into soccer’s age of the multiplicative. When Manchester United won its treble in 1999, it was the only team in any of what we now think of as Europe’s top five leagues to have done so (though Celtic, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven had all pulled it off previously). Since 2010, it has happened five times. Barcelona and Bayern have both done it twice.Domestic doubles — winning the league and the (main) domestic cup in the same season — are now so commonplace that they pass almost without notice: five for Bayern and four for Juventus and P.S.G. in the last 10 years, as well as three for Barcelona.The landscape in England, of course, is different. Competition between the country’s Big Six means City is the only team to have done the double since 2010. But its superclubs are not immune to the broader trend. For them, too, the currency of greatness is no longer primacy, but dominance.Liverpool and Manchester City will meet in the Premier League and the F.A. Cup in April, and could square off in the Champions League after that.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThat approach, though, carries with it an attendant danger, the risk that great teams — teams that have enjoyed remarkable success, that rank among the strongest the Premier League has ever seen — will somehow find themselves cast as failures: not for not winning, but for not winning enough.The final eight weeks or so of the Premier League season has long been set up as a battle between Liverpool, pursuing a quadruple, and Manchester City, chasing a treble. As they are already set to meet directly in two of those competitions over the coming weeks, both of them, by definition, cannot succeed. The likelihood, even at this late stage, remains that neither of them will.That raises the prospect of two teams, each with trophies to display and achievements to celebrate, being told to look back on their seasons with regret. If Manchester City wins only the Premier League, would that represent disappointment? It should not, of course, but in an era defined by a gluttony for glory, it might be presented — or even feel — like an anticlimax.What if Liverpool emerges from this campaign with only two domestic cups? Is that enough? Klopp’s team would have missed out on the two trophies that it most covets, of course, but that is not quite the same thing as falling short. If the only true victory is one that is total, all-conquering, absolute, then it suggests the bar has been set a little too high, that we have somehow concocted a world in which even success can be dressed up as failure.The Ignorance of IsolationQatar is expected to be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup.Franklin Jacome/Pool Via ReutersBy the time Argentina next takes to the field — at Wembley, for a meeting with the reigning European champion, Italy — it will be nearing three years since it last lost a game. Since succumbing to Brazil in the 2019 Copa América, Lionel Scaloni’s side’s only defeat has come against Sao Paulo’s health authorities. Other than that, it is played 31, won 20, drawn 11.It is, without doubt, the sort of record that should stir Argentine souls ahead of a World Cup that has particular resonance: 2022 will, after all, likely prove to be Lionel Messi’s final bow in an Argentina jersey, his last chance to emulate Diego Maradona and carry his country to the greatest prize of all.But it must still come with a caveat. That meeting with Italy — the so-called Finalissima — will be the first time Argentina has faced a European opponent since drawing with Germany in October 2019. Its run, these past few years, has been a distinctly local affair, built and made in South America.Brazil, as it happens, is in much the same boat. Since losing to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup quarterfinals, Tite’s side has faced only one European team — the Czech Republic — and that, too, was three years ago. Brazil is currently rated as the favorite to win the World Cup, a status that is based almost exclusively on its ability to beat the same South American teams over and over again.Brazil breezed through World Cup qualifying. But the World Cup may end differently.Silvia Izquierdo/Associated PressThat sudden isolation, of course, is partly linked to the coronavirus pandemic, but it is also connected to the rise of the Nations League in Europe and the exigencies of South America’s endless round of World Cup qualifying and Copas América. There has, since 2019, been very little chance to play friendlies.But as the World Cup draws closer, that absence of varied competition leads to a sense of ignorance. We can be sure that Argentina (which drew Mexico, Poland and Saudi Arabia on Friday) and Brazil (which will play Switzerland, Serbia and Cameroon in Qatar) are competitive in South America. We can have no idea at all how they will hold up against the European teams that both must overcome to emerge triumphant in Qatar.Three Euro-Centric World Cup PredictionsBelgium sits right behind Brazil in the world rankings.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is no question that soccer’s approach to draws is, deep down, extremely ludicrous. All of the pomp and the ceremony, the droning speeches and the self-importance, the window dressing and the time-wasting, all for the very simple act of some men in the warm embrace of middle age pulling pieces of paper from a bag.At the same time, though, Friday’s World Cup draw is extremely important in a way that we do not, perhaps, acknowledge as much as we should. The order in which names are flourished by a selection of soccer’s great and easily booked will not, perhaps, determine who wins the World Cup. But it will go a long way to deciding the fates of a whole clutch of teams.A kind group, for example, might make the difference between Senegal’s making the quarterfinals, or exiting after the first 10 days. A difficult one might cost Gregg Berhalter his job. It might turn Ecuador into the story of the tournament, or the Netherlands into a laughingstock. Random chance matters.It also, of course, makes it very difficult to guess at what might happen in Qatar this winter. Still, there is no harm in trying.1. A European team will win the tournament. It is now 20 years since a South American side (Brazil) won the World Cup, and only one team from the continent — Argentina — has made the final since. The balance of power has shifted in favor of the industrialized youth development systems of western Europe, and it is, sadly, hard to see that changing.Kylian Mbappé and France are chasing a second straight world title.Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via Shutterstock2. The surprise packages will not be much of a surprise at all: They will, instead, be the teams with the greatest concentration of players drawn from Europe’s major leagues. Those sides drawn from domestic competitions — Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Qatar — will struggle to make an impact.3. For the (relative) minnows and the makeweights, firepower will be the difference. Outside of the traditional elite, very few teams can call on high-caliber forwards. Those that can, like Morocco and Iran, will have an invaluable edge.CorrespondenceWorkers inside Qatar’s 80,000-seat Lusail stadium. It will host the World Cup final in December.David Ramos/Getty ImagesA note from Alan Goldhammer, whose surname remains the single greatest thing about this correspondence section, on an issue that we will confront over the next eight months. “I will not watch matches played in stadiums built largely by ‘slave’ labor,” he wrote. “It might be a minority view, but it was a decision that I arrived at 18 months ago and it did not require a great deal of thinking. I am sure the World Cup will have a giant viewership. That viewership will be diminished by one and I would hope many more.”If that applies to you, too, I would be interested in hearing from you. It is something we all have to be conscious of, whether we engage with the World Cup as fans, as journalists, or even as players: To what extent is that interaction a form of complicity?Paul Rosenberg, meanwhile, wants to know if there is “any shock comparable to Italy’s loss against North Macedonia?” In World Cup finals, the answer to that is yes: France’s losing to Senegal in 2002 and North Korea’s win over Italy in 1966, among several others. For qualifying, it is a little trickier, but I would suggest Ireland’s beating the Dutch to reach the 2002 World Cup might be up there.And, of course, there had to be someone who would leap to the defense of deep-dish pizza. (This was genuinely the first email that appeared in my inbox after last week’s newsletter; it obviously cut deep.) That someone was Rich Johnson. “I must express my deep disappointment at your recent pejorative characterization of deep dish pizza,” he wrote. “As a Chicago native, I can tell you that the only thing better than deep dish pizza is stuffed pizza, which is perhaps the perfect meal.”It may or may not be the perfect meal, but a stuffed pizza — like a deep-dish pizza — is not actually a pizza. More

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      Soccer’s Richest Clubs Sidestep UEFA Salary Cap in New Cost Controls

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      UEFA’s new financial regulations will tie spending to club revenues, entrenching the advantages wealthy clubs already enjoy in the market for talent.The biggest reforms of European soccer’s financial controls in a generation will stop short of creating U.S.-style salary caps to restrain teams’ spending, and instead will enact rules that are unlikely to stop the continent’s richest clubs from buying up the best talent and winning the most coveted trophies.UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has spent more than a year in talks with a representative group for elite clubs about a new model to replace its so-called financial fair play rules, the cost-control mechanism that has for a decade sought to limit team expenditures as part of an effort to promote competition.UEFA has finally alighted on a replacement. Teams’ soccer-related spending, according to people briefed on the regulations, will not be able to surpass 70 percent of their income, a regulation that appears watered down from the strict salary cap that had long been championed by UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin.Ceferin had for at least five years discussed imposing salary caps as a way to address European soccer’s growing wealth gap. But faced with the complexities of European employment law and deep-pocketed opposition, UEFA has abandoned the concept of a hard cap and, according to three people familiar with the proposals, settled on a proposal that — after a three-year implementation period — will require teams to keep their spending within a strict ratio.The rules will be added to UEFA’s rule book after a vote of its executive board on April 7. They will also be renamed, with UEFA looking to move away from F.F.P., or financial fair play, a term coined under Ceferin’s predecessor, and instead adopt a more prosaic title: financial sustainability regulations.In more than a decade of use, the current financial fair play system has proved more adept at producing critics than fairness. Smaller teams complained that they were punished for rule breaches while bigger, wealthier teams were often able to avoid the most severe penalties. The biggest and richest clubs, meanwhile, objected to the financial controls as an unfair curb on their ambitions.Talks about changing the regulations accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, when shuttered stadiums and rebates to television broadcasters caused financial unease for teams big and small. UEFA reported in February that an estimated 7 billion euros (about $7.7 billion) had been collectively wiped off clubs’ balance sheets during the pandemic.Despite their lofty nod to sustainability, the rules changes may in fact entrench the growing hegemony of wealthy English teams, which benefit not only from the highest domestic television revenues in global soccer but also access to the wealth of some of the richest owners in sports. In last season’s Champions League, two English teams met in the final for the second time in three years.The move to bring soccer-related costs like wages and transfer fees into a tight ratio will be a challenge for many major teams outside England, the vast majority of which have struggled to maintain fiscal discipline as they tried to keep up with rivals who play in the Premier League.In Italy, for example, wage costs alone often exceed the ratios being proposed by UEFA. In Spain, which has some of the strictest financial rules in soccer, the powerhouse team Barcelona was unable to retain the star player Lionel Messi last year because doing so would have breached a cap imposed on the team by the league.Discussions about the ratio UEFA should impose on clubs were complicated by conflicting interests. Some teams, particularly those backed by wealthy owners used to pumping their own cash into buying success for their teams, had wanted the limit to be as high as 85 percent. Others, including several German clubs, whose balance sheets are typically kept under control by a system in which members retain a majority stake in ownership, argued for an even lower limit.To allow the teams to adjust to the new regulations, the new rules will be imposed over time: Clubs will be able to spend up to 90 percent of their revenues before that figure will be brought to its permanent 70 percent level within three seasons. According to the proposed rules, teams may under certain circumstances be allowed the flexibility to spend up to about $10 million above the ratio, provided they have healthy balance sheets and have not breached regulations before.UEFA’s critics have long complained that while they have had cost-control rules in place, they have often failed to punish the biggest teams. In recent years, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain — teams bankrolled by wealthy Gulf States — have been able to avoid severe penalties on technical grounds.There has also been little clarity around the current punishment mechanism, and concerns about UEFA’s appetite to take on the hardest cases. Several longstanding members of the panels overseeing the financial rules have either been replaced or walked out in recent years. Sunil Gulati, the former U.S. Soccer president, last year was named chairman of UEFA’s revamped financial control panel.Under the new system, UEFA will have the right to impose both sporting and financial penalties for rule breakers, including fines, threat of expulsion and, for the first time, an option for demoting teams between the three competitions it currently operates. A team in the Champions League, for example, could be relegated to the second-tier Europa League for a financial rules breach.Another measure may also include point deductions under the revised format of the Champions League and the Europa League: Starting in 2024 all participants will be placed in a single league table during the first phase of the competition. And the regulations also will require greater scrutiny of sponsorship deals amid claims that some teams have benefited from inflated agreements with companies linked to their ownership groups.UEFA is talking about the proposals with several clubs that are already on performance plans because of their poor financial records. Those teams, as many as 40, made so-called settlement agreements with the governing body in order to keep participating in their tournaments. More

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      City Thumps United in Manchester Derby Stripped of Its Tension

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      The Manchester derby has changed, mostly because United can no longer keep pace and City no longer has anything to prove.MANCHESTER, England — There was no tension in the last few minutes. It had gone long before the fourth goal arrived, marking the point at which victory turned into a rout. So had what little anxiety, what scant fretfulness might still have lingered. Instead, in the final few minutes of a derby, Manchester City’s fans could let go and enjoy themselves.Theirs was not a vicarious joy. There was pleasure, of course, to be had in the sight of Manchester United, once again, reduced to chasing shadows, grasping hopelessly at air, its players’ heads hanging and its fans silently trooping away. But as the minutes ticked by, the Etihad Stadium grew a little tired of crowing.Instead, City’s fans seemed light, playful. They sang the praises of Yaya Touré and his brother, Kolo, neither of whom has played for the club for some time. They turned their backs on the field, stringing their arms along each other’s shoulders and bouncing, a move known as the Poznan. City had imported it a decade ago, after a Europa League trip to Poland, but its popularity had waned. It has a vintage air, now, the feel of an inside joke.This is not how derbies are supposed to be. They are supposed to be fraught and febrile, full of visceral anger and naked hostility. The Manchester derby still has some of that: Midway through the first half, after Jadon Sancho had drawn Manchester United even, he had celebrated in the eye-line of one fan, in particular, who greeted him with puce-faced rage. It was undercut only slightly by the fact that the fan was wearing a large novelty sombrero.It is difficult, though, to escape the sense that over the years much of that fury has dissipated, at least for one half of the city. Manchester City still relishes beating its old foe, its overweening neighbor, of course. But it does not do so with the urgency, the desperation of old. This is no longer a club with a point to prove. It is no longer a day to be dreaded. Increasingly, for Manchester City, derby day is fun.Riyad Mahrez scored City’s final two goals.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesFor all the attention rivalries command, for all the baroque music and the pulse-quickening montages they inspire, the shape of most of them is hard-baked and unchanging. The players and the managers and the precise circumstances in which teams meet might change from month to month and year to year, but the basic story, the outline, remains the same.In some cases, that is David seeking to give Goliath a bloody nose. Can Torino beat Juventus, just this once? Can Borussia Dortmund slow Bayern Munich’s relentless march to another championship, even for just a week or so, or can Atlético Madrid shake off its inferiority complex for long enough to pick off Real Madrid?In other derbies, it is a meeting of equal powers, vying for immediate supremacy. Barcelona’s meetings with Real Madrid are, often, ciphers for the outcome of the Spanish title race. Arsenal’s encounters with Tottenham in the North London Derby are, generally, a tussle to see which might be in contention for a place in the Champions League.Rarely does that broader narrative change. A.C. Milan might be a little weaker than Inter Milan — or vice versa — at any given time, but the teams remain peers at heart. The pendulum always swings back, whether it takes a month or a season or a couple of years, and so the nature of the rivalry remains the same.The Manchester derby has changed, though, and changed beyond recognition. There was a time, back before Abu Dhabi arrived at City and the money started flowing, when this game defined the club’s season. It was a date anticipated and dreaded in equal measure. Victory, pricking United’s conceit, could make the other nine months of bleak mediocrity worthwhile. Defeat simply lengthened the shadows.Once City’s horizons lifted, the derby became the stage on which the club sought to shake off its deep-rooted inferiority complex, to prove that it was ready to compete. At first, it brought nothing but heartache. One year, Michael Owen scored in injury time at Old Trafford, the pain more intense because parity had been so close. Another year, Wayne Rooney leapt into the sky, his comic-book overhead kick breaking City’s hearts again.And then the spell broke. City beat United twice on the way to the Premier League title in 2012: a breathtaking, era-changing 6-1 win at Old Trafford followed by a nail-biting 1-0 victory at the Etihad, the game that ultimately swung the race in City’s favor. Everything was inverted: Now it was City with the sense of superiority, and United trying to burst its bubble, taking just a little glee in scuppering a superpower.Bruno Fernandes, left, and United found few positives on Sunday.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockNow, though, it has taken another form still. There is no fear in this game for City now, not one that is rooted in any rationality. This is no longer the game that decides the season. Instead, that will be Liverpool’s visit to City next month, or the Champions League final, or some other seismic, global event. This game, to City, now feels like a distinctly local skirmish.Part of that, of course, is because of the change in Manchester City, its transformation under Pep Guardiola — fueled by the financial power of the club’s benefactors in the Gulf — into a truly modern superpower, which has rendered the derby an inevitable conclusion, a fait accompli.But it is also because of Manchester United’s journey in the opposite direction, the perfect counterweight to the idea that money guarantees success, its dismal and seemingly irreversible decline. The gap between these teams has yawned ever wider in the last few years. It is now a chasm, vast and deep, and it is hard to see how United can start to close it.As City’s fans reveled in their looming victory, as they wheeled out the songs they used to sing when triumph was rare and the fury ran deep, United’s players seemed to wander, dazed, around the pitch, their morale sapped and their hope shattered. That, more than anything, may have drained the toxins from the crowd. There could be no tension. There could be no hatred. When the gap is so wide, when superiority is so evident, where could the fun be in that? More

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      At Wrexham and Elsewhere, the Soccer Is Just a Story Line

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      In a steady stream of documentary series, more and more clubs are turning themselves into content. But where does spectacle end and sport begin?LONDON — The cameras were rolling even before the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney could be sure there would be anything to film.Last November, Reynolds and McElhenney were waiting anxiously to discover if their bid to buy Wrexham, a Welsh club marooned in the fifth tier of English soccer, would survive a vote from the Supporters’ Trust, the fans’ group that had rescued the team from bankruptcy and run it on a threadbare budget for years.The actors had reason to be confident: When they had presented their ideas to the Trust in a video call, the reaction had been positive. Still, as they waited for the call that would inform them of the result of the vote, they did not know if it would be good or bad news, and that put them in something of a bind.McElhenney had concocted the idea of buying a soccer team after inhaling both seasons of “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” the successful Netflix series that detailed the fleeting ups and frequent downs of another faded club rooted in postindustrial Britain. “He told me: ‘We should do this. We should buy a club and make a documentary,’” said Humphrey Ker, one of McElhenney’s writers and the person who had recommended the Sunderland series to him.If the Wrexham trust rejected the actors’ ownership bid, their plan would be up in smoke; after all, with no club, there would be no documentary. But for the documentary to work, it had to follow their adventure in soccer from the very start. So as they waited for the phone to ring, McElhenney and Reynolds had to decide, effectively, which came first: the content or the club?Wrexham is not the only place wrestling with that question. Soccer has long provided fertile ground for film and television, but the rise of streaming platforms — with their insatiable appetites and generous wallets and breakthrough series involving entirely fictional teams — has triggered a deluge of productions.Some, like Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary series, have tried to draw on the inbuilt appeal of some of the world’s biggest clubs, embedding multiple camera crews over the course of a season with teams like Manchester City, Tottenham and Juventus.Amazon’s “All or Nothing” series has followed several top clubs, with their permission.Amazon PrimeManchester City, Tottenham and Juventus have opened their doors to the series already.Amazon PrimeOthers have eschewed the editorial control — and considerable fees — the game’s superpowers demand in favor of a more authentic aesthetic embodied by “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” in which the club is less the subject of the documentary and more a backdrop against which a human story plays out.But there is one crucial difference between many of those projects and their forerunner. In Sunderland, the producers were mere observers of the club. At Wrexham, and elsewhere, they are something more: They are actors in the drama.“Soccer clubs are the best content investments in the world,” said Matt Rizzetta, the chairman of the creative agency North Six Group and, since 2020, the principal owner of Campobasso, a team in Italy’s third tier. “They stand for a set of values, and they automatically connect with people in a way that almost nothing else can match.”Rizzetta said his decision to invest in soccer was driven by his heart — it was a “lifelong dream” to own a team, he said, particularly one based close to the part of Italy where his grandparents had grown up — but his thinking behind buying Campobasso, in particular, was governed by his head.“We looked at around 20 teams, all in that area,” he said. Campobasso stood out. It had once reached the second division, but had found far more snakes than ladders in recent years. It is based in Molise, a region that often complains it is overlooked by the rest of the country: Molise Non Esiste, as the self-deprecating local slogan puts it: Molise doesn’t exist.That suited Rizzetta perfectly. His strategy was centered on “content, storytelling, marketing and media,” he said. “Being a club owner now is different to the 1980s and 1990s. Provincial teams, in particular, need new revenue streams to reinvest in the product, and content is one of the most underutilized channels.”To remedy that, Rizzetta’s North Six Group signed a deal with Italian Football TV, a YouTube channel, for a documentary series that would follow Campobasso on its (eventually successful) attempt at winning its first promotion in decades.“It was a story that needed to be told, this team from a part of the country that has been forgotten,” Rizzetta said. That obscurity, to some extent, helped make the project viable. “It was a small, sleepy club,” he said. “It had the feel of a start-up. We kind of had a blank slate. There was nothing we could do that would be wrong.”Not every group of supporters, though, welcomes that kind of approach. This summer, it was announced that Peter Crouch, the former England striker, would be joining the board of Dulwich Hamlet, a team based in a well-heeled enclave in south London where he made a handful of appearances in the early stages of his career.The move was not motivated purely by altruism: Crouch’s experiences, it emerged a few days later, would form the basis of a documentary bankrolled by Discovery+. According to several people involved with the project, the network had explicitly conceived the idea as a chance to create its own version of “Sunderland ’Til I Die.”“Sunderland ’Til I Die” has served as a model for a host of documentary producers.NetflixThe idea has “received a mixed response,” said Alex Crane, a former chairman of the Dulwich Hamlet Supporters’ Trust. “Some fans are genuinely excited,” Crane wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Others are very skeptical, and are querying what the club gets out of it.”Certainly, the apparent theme of the documentary — that Dulwich faces a “bleak future” and Crouch has parachuted in to save it — has not been universally accepted. The Brixton Buzz, a community news outlet, suggested, with some profanity, that the “TV narrative” had been concocted purely for the sake of the series.That trap — contorting themselves to become a more marketable pitch — is one Rizzetta is adamant clubs must avoid. In September, North Six Group added Ascoli — in Italy’s second division — to its stable of teams. It appealed to the club’s former owner, Rizzetta said, as a “strategic operator” that could reproduce its Campobasso success on a larger scale. Among the first things the new owners did was sign an exclusive deal with Italian Football TV.“Content is still a big part of our strategy,” Rizzetta said. “But it will have to be done in a different way. Ascoli has a different message, brand and story. It is sacred to its community.”Reynolds and McElhenney have been equally explicit about their plans. “The documentary is a huge part” of the project, McElhenney said on the actors’ first visit to Wrexham in October. “We feel that is the best way to really do a deep dive into the community. You can televise the games, but if you’re not following the story of the players and the story of the community, ultimately nobody is really going to care.”Wrexham is already feeling the benefits of its sprinkling of Hollywood stardust. A raft of impressive signings arrived over the summer to strengthen the team. There has been investment, too, in the club’s infrastructure.“The stadium is being remodeled,” said Spencer Harris, a club director before the takeover. “The first team’s training facility is much better. The club are building for long-term success. It feels sustainable.”Some of that new money has come from ticket sales — crowds are up this season — and some from a spike in the sale of replica jerseys. By October, Wrexham had sold more than 8,000 — almost as many as it would ordinarily ship in a good year — with the Christmas rush still to come.But perhaps most significantly — and lucratively — the jerseys themselves are a little different. The away shirt is green and gray, McElhenney’s tribute to his hometown Philadelphia Eagles. Ifor Williams Trailers, formerly the club’s principal sponsor, has been replaced by the more recognizable insignia of TikTok. Expedia’s logo stretches across the shoulders.Though the team’s first game of the season was televised nationally in Britain, it is not the audiences that tune in to BT Sport to watch the National League that coaxed brands of that stature to invest in Wrexham. Far more appealing was the prospect of being front and center on prime-time television.In May, Reynolds and McElhenney announced — in the wry style that has characterized their ownership so far — that they had sold two seasons of their documentary, “Welcome to Wrexham,” to FX. It will include the moment they received the call to confirm that their bid to buy the club had been approved by the fans. It was all captured on film. The content, it turned out, was inseparable from the club. More

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      Saudi Arabia, Newcastle and Soccer’s Worship of Money

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      The sale of a Premier League team symbolizes a sport’s unashamed devotion to wealth above all else.One single sentence, printed in block capitals, emblazoned on a laminated banner, captured it all: all of the pain and resentment and angst and fury of all those years spent under the turgid, wearying, bleak years of Mike Ashley’s ownership of Newcastle United, that decade and a half when the club’s owner seemed to take pleasure, after a while, in draining his own fans of spirit, and pleasure, and hope.The sentence on the banner made its first appearance nearly seven years ago, at what turned out to be just the halfway point of Ashley’s tenure. It was a reference to that dispiriting habit his club had developed of spurning England’s two domestic cups — the two trophies the club had even the slimmest chance of winning — so much that, often, the team looked as if it was trying to get knocked out early on purpose.It had been prepared for precisely one of those occasions. Newcastle was away at Leicester in the F.A. Cup in January 2015. Or a team playing as Newcastle was, anyway: As ever in the cups, Newcastle had sent out a weakened side, a selection of reserves and fringe players and supporting acts. The headliners had been held back in order to attend to the real business of finishing 15th in the Premier League.Newcastle, as the fans who had traveled to watch their team would have expected, duly lost. It was the very predictability that they were protesting, during the game, when they unfurled the banner.“We do not demand a team that wins,” it read, “we demand a club that tries.”A refrain, born in frustration, became a rallying cry.David Klein/ReutersThe slogan has become a familiar one, as pithy and compelling a summation of everything that Newcastle had been reduced to under Ashley. The banner itself has made occasional appearances over the years, too, as protests have flashed and mutiny has simmered.It was back again, on Thursday evening, for what may prove to be its last hurrah. The circumstances, this time, were a little different: It was carried around not as a rallying cry for an uprising, but as a standard of a battle that had been won. Ashley, at last, was gone, and thousands of Newcastle fans had made their way to St. James’s Park, their shining castle on the hill, to celebrate.Few, if any, of their fellow fans would begrudge them that. Something of a myth has been allowed to take hold, over the last few years, about Newcastle’s fans. They have developed a reputation for being equal parts demanding and delusional, for believing their club uniquely deserving of a restoration to a place of prominence in English soccer’s firmament that it never, really, occupied in the first place.The reality is almost exactly the opposite. All Newcastle’s fans have ever really asked for is a team that is mildly entertaining to watch, and a bit of effort from those charged with running the club. The banner made that perfectly clear. Ashley’s affront was not failing to win; it was robbing them of the hope that they might.That represents the ultimate betrayal of ownership to all fans, and though their estimations of their own suffering have long been hugely overstated — Newcastle’s ordeal of permanent irrelevance in the Premier League is not quite of the same order as that of Bury, a club that no longer exists, or that of the countless Football League teams to have brushed liquidation in recent years — there has been an abundance of sympathy to their plight. Only at Sunderland, Newcastle’s neighbor and bitter rival, might anyone regret the departure of Ashley, and the end of Newcastle’s nightmare.Any owner not named Mike Ashley would have found support in Newcastle.Lindsey Parnaby/EPA, via ShutterstockBut that was not the only thing the crowd had gathered to celebrate on Thursday. There was glee, too, at the start of what appears to be a dream. It is not just that Newcastle has been freed from Ashley, it is that it has been liberated by the sort of owner who seems to promise a club that tries and a team that wins.Newcastle is now the richest club in soccer, backed by the unimaginable wealth of the Public Investment Fund, the investment vehicle of Saudi Arabia but absolutely not — and apologies if this makes no sense — in any way linked to the Saudi state, even though Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler, is the chairman of the P.I.F., and even though it describes itself as a “sovereign” wealth fund, which rather gives away where its money comes from.It was that distinction that persuaded the Premier League to wave the deal through. When it held up the Saudi-led takeover last year, the league had not, it turned out, been worried that Saudi Arabia was pirating its content through a rogue television broadcaster, or that it had banned BeIN Sports, one of league’s key network partners, from operating in its territory, or even about the kingdom’s jailing of women’s rights activists or the persecution of dissidents or the chemical castration of gay people or the brutal, unrelenting war in Yemen or the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.No, the Premier League just needed to be reassured that the Mohammed bin Salman who runs Saudi Arabia would not interfere with the decisions of the Mohammed bin Salman who runs Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund.Once the league had those promises, the P.I.F. was free to acquire 80 percent of one of the league’s member clubs and to begin to think about how to take on Manchester City, a club definitely not owned by Abu Dhabi, in the Premier League and Paris St.-Germain, a club totally separate from the Qatari state, in the Champions League.And a handful of Newcastle fans were free to gather outside St. James’s Park in thobes and headdresses, waving the Saudi flag, inscribed with the shahada, while singing that their club had, at last, been returned to them.This, of course, is the point of the whole thing. Saudi Arabia, and its crown prince in particular, is obsessed with its image. It is why it runs troll farms in Riyadh dedicated to swarming anyone who dares to criticize the regime online. It is why it does not tolerate dissent. It is why Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered, according to United States intelligence, by a hit squad acting on the orders of Salman, the man who runs the country and the one who is the chairman of the fund that now owns a Premier League soccer team.There are plenty of Newcastle fans who are uneasy about that connection, about the fact that it is now possible to write a sentence in which the murder of a journalist and Newcastle United both feature.But there are plenty more — a supporters’ trust survey last year found that almost 97 percent were in favor of the Saudi takeover — who are willing to turn a blind eye to that ethical dilemma, to assert that their new owner is no worse than Manchester City’s, or to point out that Liverpool is sponsored by a bank that has been accused of laundering the profits of drug cartels, or to suggest that since Britain is happy to sell arms to the Saudis, it might as well sell its soccer teams, to claim that when everything is rotten there is nothing to do but succumb to putrefaction.Many Newcastle fans accused the Premier League of blocking the sale of the club to a Saudi-led group.Scott Heppell/ReutersAnd there are others still — the ones in the thobes, the ones with the Saudi flag in their social media avatars, the ones who have issued scrawls of abuse to Khashoggi’s widow for daring to challenge the morality of the takeover — who are perfectly happy to embrace it, to do precisely what the Saudis want them to do.The P.I.F. has not bought Newcastle because it loves soccer, or England’s northeast, or the beach at Tynemouth or the leafy streets of Gosforth or the grand Georgian facades of Gray Street.It has bought Newcastle to diversify its economy, to enmesh strategic allegiances in sport and culture, to rehabilitate its image, to make people think of Saudi Arabia and soccer before they think of Saudi Arabia and starving children in Yemen. The fact that it gets a free vanguard of vitriolic advocates on social media — just as Abu Dhabi has managed at Manchester City — is a bonus.Newcastle United, and those fans, are being used, just as City is being used and just as P.S.G. is being used and Chelsea is being used, just as soccer as a whole is being used and, in the process, corrupted. And yes, those fans are complicit in it. But they are not the only ones to blame.So, too, are the authorities that have allowed this to happen, time and time again: the Premier League, with the “ownership neutral” stance that it wears with such pride, and the Football Association and UEFA and FIFA and all the rest of them, the bodies that are supposed to protect and cherish the sport but have instead sold it off to the highest bidder.And so, too, are the rest of us: the journalists and the commentators and the observers and the fans, everyone who has reveled in the conspicuous consumption of transfer deadline day, anyone who has ever taken the Deloitte Money League as a sign of the sport’s health, rather than a damning indictment of its venality, its naked, unashamed worship of money.Gulf riches transformed Manchester City into a championship team. Newcastle fans will be hoping the same will happen at their club.Pool photo by Dave Thompson/EPA, via ShutterstockA year or so after Newcastle’s fans unfurled that banner, Everton was playing away at Aston Villa. Their club had just been taken over, too, this time by Farhad Moshiri, a British-Iranian businessman with a personal fortune of impossible vastness. They, too, could not believe their luck. “We’re rich,” they sang that night, over and over again, a profanity wedged between those two words.There is a warning in there, of course — five years later, Everton is roughly where it used to be in the Premier League table, but about $500 million in transfer fees worse off — but the story does not require a particularly deep reading. For 30 years, the Premier League has lionized wealth — as a means to an end, and now, after a while, as an end in itself.The natural, logical, unavoidable conclusion of that culture is Newcastle fans gathering outside St. James’s Park in traditional Saudi dress. The only way for clubs to compete, the only way for owners to restore hope in its purest form, is money. And it is Saudi Arabia that has the most money.It is money that has distorted soccer to such an extent that all dreams but one are now dead. There is no hope of a team’s breaking through thanks to a particularly gifted crop of youngsters who emerge from its academy. There is precious little belief that an inspirational manager, with a keen eye for talent, will be enough to challenge the petroclubs for league titles and European trophies.The only thing that can do that, the only dream that survives, is that your club will, somehow, one day wake up with more money than everyone else. That, in effect, is what happened to Newcastle on Thursday: the sudden, jolting realization that its wildest fantasy had come true; not just that its purgatory was over, but that its paradise had arrived.It is easy to point at those fans and say that they are the problem — that it is their willingness to pay any price for success that means that yet another club that prides itself as a community institution is now in the hands of an owner who is willing to use it for selfish ends; that they are apparently ready to service the needs of the murderous regime that is seeking to deploy soccer to launder its image.But they are not the problem; they are the consequence of the problem. They are the end point of an era and a culture obsessed with acquisition, that believes ambition can be measured only in millions of dollars, that cherishes those who spend and castigates those who do not, that has welcomed money, whatever its provenance, as an objective good, and never questioned, not once, what that money might want to do, what its purpose might be.This is the answer. This is where that path leads — to a place where the only hope that fans have is money, where dreams are built on money, and where there is no such thing as a price too high to pay.CorrespondenceMore examples this week of countries that field multiple national teams, courtesy of Sean O’Brien. “It’s basically just a list of former colonies that are now dependent or unincorporated territories — mostly in the Caribbean,” Sean wrote, mentioning American Samoa and Puerto Rico, Aruba and Curaçao.The United Kingdom features again here: Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and Bermuda all field their own national teams. I stand wholeheartedly corrected, by both Sean and Joe Chihade, who wrote along similar lines, but mentioned Gibraltar as well. This is going to get uncomfortably political, isn’t it? And I only feel entitled to do jokes about Britain.Alphonso Davies and Canada earned a 1-1 draw at Mexico in a World Cup qualifier on Thursday, a lift to the Canadians’ campaign to qualify for the finals for the first time since 1986.Jose Mendez/EPA, via ShutterstockYusuke Toyoda, meanwhile, wonders whether we are making enough effort to pronounce players’ names, citing the estimable Derek Rae. “This seems to plague Brazilian and Portuguese players the most (I remember being surprised that Ronaldinho is pronounced more like ‘Hu-now-jee-new’),” Yusuke wrote. “My question is, how hard would it be to fix this? If the Premier League goes to the trouble of creating a starting XI video for every player, couldn’t they also have each player say his name?”That is, I believe, the case: I have several friends — including a couple on Set Piece Menu — who work as commentators and are extremely pious about the accuracy of their pronunciations. The Premier League asks each and every player, every season, how they wish to be mentioned, and then sends a phonetic pronunciation to every broadcaster.Of course, that does not mean they always get it right. Commentary is an extremely difficult skill to master, and there are moments when they may slip. My personal belief — and I say this as someone with a name that lots and lots of people, all over the world, find entirely baffling — is that as long as you make an effort, then that should be enough.That, perhaps, is a view rooted in privilege, but I would imagine most people, like me, when they hear someone have a good go at a name that does not come naturally — it’s the double R, in my case: I tend to get Roly, Lolly, Lori and, of course, that old standby Roy* — are content to know that someone is showing them the respect of trying, and willing to go along with whatever works best. I’ve certainly never known a player to complain about it, as long as an attempt is made in good faith.[*The other day, someone tried to get my attention by calling me “Greg.” Eventually, I had to respond, and I felt intimidated by how awkward it would be to correct them, so I didn’t say anything. I then immediately texted my wife to say that, from now on, for the sake of good manners, should we ever find ourselves together with that person, she should refer to me as Greg so as to spare that person’s blushes. I don’t know why I’m phrasing this so carefully. The person is clearly not a reader.] More

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      Major Obstacle Removed in Saudi Bid for Newcastle

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      The end of a piracy dispute involving the Premier League broadcaster beIN Sports could clear the way for a Saudi-led group to buy Newcastle United.LONDON — Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund moved closer to acquiring a Premier League soccer team after the kingdom reached an agreement that resolved the league’s biggest objection to a proposed sale of Newcastle United.A $400 million deal in which Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, would cede control of the team to an ownership group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had been reached more than a year ago. But the sale appeared to collapse over a yearslong dispute between Saudi Arabia and beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based television network that owned the Premier League’s broadcast rights in the Middle East.Saudi Arabia had since 2017 blocked beIN from operating inside its borders amid a diplomatic dispute with Qatar, its tiny but hugely wealthy neighbor. BeIN, the Premier League and other major sports property owners later accused Saudi Arabia of hosting and operating a rogue television network that pirated billions of dollars’ worth of content that had been sold to the Qatari broadcaster.The Newcastle sale was drawn into that dispute last year when beIN officials lobbied Premier League officials and the British government not to approve the takeover. The league never had to make a decision: Facing mounting public pressure and citing “an unforeseen prolonged process,” the Saudi group withdrew its bid.In the past year, though, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and a group of their neighbors have rebuilt diplomatic and economic ties by ending a three-year blockade of Qatar and normalizing diplomatic relations.Under Premier League rules, prospective buyers of league teams are required to be vetted in order to meet a so-called fit-and-proper standard required of new owners. The group involved in the Newcastle takeover, which also includes the British businesswoman Amanda Staveley and two billionaire property-investor brothers, walked away after the league spent months deliberating over the sale.At the time, the most problematic issue for the Premier League was the proposed sale of one of its members to an entity that the league itself had accused of harming the business of an important commercial partner. With an agreement to resolve the beIN piracy dispute in place, there is nothing in the Premier League’s rules to block the sale of a team to an entity that is an arm of a nation state. Manchester City, for example, the reigning Premier League champion, is controlled by a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.Smoothing the pathway to a sale could be a separate legal issue as well. Infuriated by the collapse of his deal to sell Newcastle, Ashley in May filed a lawsuit against the Premier League, seeking millions of dollars in damages and accusing the league of blocking the sale. The Premier League was not known to have ever previously blocked a sale, and with the Saudi group’s withdrawal, it appeared not to have done so with Newcastle, despite Ashley’s claims.A Saudi takeover would be the latest infusion of sovereign Gulf money into European soccer, joining owners not only at City but also Qatar’s ownership of the French champion Paris St.-Germain. The seemingly bottomless resources of those ownership groups have since built teams that are now firmly established as among the best in Europe, and reshaped the modern soccer economy.Newcastle’s long-suffering fans have been hoping to enjoy the same rapid rise ever since news of the Saudi interest first emerged. Supporters of the club have taken to social media by the thousands to champion the sale, signed petitions and even filed legal action against the Premier League to push the takeover forward.Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, second from right. He sued the Premier League last year, accusing it of blocking him from selling it.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockNewcastle narrowly missed winning the Premier League title twice in the mid-1990s but has not won a major domestic trophy since the 1955 F.A. Cup. The last of the club’s four English titles came in 1927, and the club’s more recent history has been dominated by fan opposition to Ashley, the retail tycoon who acquired the team in 2007.The Saudi-led investors had proposed spending as much as $320 million over five years to turn Newcastle into a competitive force in the Premier League and to invest in infrastructure around its stadium.While the Premier League’s glamour and global reach have long made it a magnet for the world’s superrich — team owners currently include American billionaires, a Russian oligarch, a Chinese holding company and a Gulf royal — the prospect of a Saudi state buyout has led to scrutiny never seen before.When the agreement was first announced, human rights groups and even the widow of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi wrote to the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, to urge him to block the sale because of the involvement of the Public Investment Fund, which is led by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.That type of criticism is likely to resurface if Saudi Arabia resurrects, and completes, its deal with Ashley.Buying into a major international soccer league with a global reach would follow similar recent forays into the sports industry by Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has for years made plans to develop its economy beyond oil, and sports and entertainment have emerged as key parts of a broad investment strategy. Millions have been spent so far on attracting boxing, golf and motor sports events to Saudi Arabia, but officials are aware that none carry the appeal of soccer.Earlier this year, the head of the country’s soccer federation called on FIFA to study the possibility of increasing the frequency of the men’s World Cup to every two years instead of every four. Saudi Arabia is working behind the scenes to win the rights to host the event. More